Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day, Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters, and Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Michael Cunningham is possessed by a spirit, one whom a good deal of contemporary writers find it hard to shake: Virginia Woolf walks the hallways of his novels … with new emergencies rushing by us each day, I find it harder and harder to abide literature concerned with the pandemic itself, rather than its long-tail outcomes. (Woolf’s own Mrs. Dalloway—an obvious influence on Day—benefited from being set after, not during, the flu epidemic of 1919-20.) And yet, Day is not really about the pandemic at all, and its first section, set long before anyone besides virologists had ever uttered the word coronavirus, is by far its strongest. Cunningham scatters his characters to their separate emotional exiles with an aim to bring them together at day’s (and Day‘s) end. Dispersal is his forte … Cunningham beautifully pries apart the notion of what it means to have outgrown something, to be living in the liminal space between an earlier self and a future self, to be

unable ‘to reenter the orderly passage of time.’ Day is even set on a date New Yorkers will recognize as a kind of faux spring, when, in defiance of the calendar, the earth stays hard and the flowers huddle underground … In this novel that puzzles over the elasticity of all kinds of love—familial, parental, erotic, queer, fraternal, ambiguous—I yearned for Cunningham to forget his literary peers and stick with his own special talent … When Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.”

–Hillary Kelly on Michael Cunningham’s Day (The Los Angeles Times)

“It has been a robust year for celebrity memoirs…There’s the sob story, the gallant bildungsroman, the louche chronicle of various addictive behaviors, the righteous making of an activist, the victory lap. Streisand’s book, in its sheer breadth and largesse, attempts to be all of these things, and thus becomes something incredibly rare. Call it the diva’s memoir, an act of bravura entertainment and impossible stamina. The diva’s memoir is, by definition, a somewhat delusional form, in that its author lives in a very different world from the rest of us, and has a different sense of scale …

If something interests her, then it is interesting, full stop. In a way, she draws on an old-fashioned idea of celebrity: to be a star is to be golden, and to make everything you touch look the same. And would we want anything less? Streisand has never thought it necessary to contain herself, and there’s no reason to start now. The audio version of My Name Is Barbra is forty-eight hours long—the longest author-read memoir at Penguin Random House. It is also, I would argue, the superlative way to experience Streisand’s opus. She ad-libs at will; she refuses to say the word ‘farts.’ Sometimes she sounds like a tired bubbe, sometimes a grand dame. But she’s her best, as ever, when she’s singing….The sound is pure, exultant catharsis. It will make you believe in something, if not quite as much as the singer believes in herself.”

–Rachel Syme on Babra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The New Yorker)

“Putting Rand in the title of one’s satirical novel feels like a dare, or at least—in a hyper-polarized time—a provocation. The good news is Freiman has written one of the funniest and unruliest novels in ages. It shakes you by the shoulders until you laugh, vomit or both … Freiman scratches at the difference between knowing and knowingness, and how our blind spots can subsume our personality … Rife with dissatisfactions—to its credit—and with self-aware jokes and serious questions about self-awareness. Also: serious questions about jokes … Ultimately, though, the author torques her contrarianism past trolling, past knee-jerk philosophizing and past satire, alchemizing a critique of literary culture in all its ideological waywardness.”

–Ryan Chapman on Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn (The Los Angeles Times)

“The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalises, instead of essentialising. Elkin centres the book around second-wave feminism … Elkin seeks to demonstrate that any universal concept or theory about art is impossible. In a project that is fundamentally based on embodiment, there is only the individual’s reaction. The feelings we have in our bodies about what we see and experience are the truest theory—or perhaps they are beyond theory, and beyond the bounds of judgment … Instead of separating the art from the artist, she fuses the two together completely, provoking new, deeper questions about how feminism can and must evolve to engage with those who do things differently—the monsters in our midst.”

–Eliza Goodpasture on Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (The Guardian)

“The chasm between men and women is so vast in Claire Keegan’s story collection, So Late in the Day, that her characters might as well speak different languages. (In two of the three stories, they do.) Each of these tight, potent stories takes place over just a few hours, and each explores the fraught dynamics between two people, a man and a woman … Keegan’s stories are built around character rather than action, but they never flag. The tension builds almost imperceptibly until it is suddenly unbearable. As in her stunning, tiny novels, Foster and Small Things Like These, she has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something…Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read …

All three stories pivot on a clash of expectations and desires, with women wanting independence and adventure and men expecting old-fashioned subservience and feeling baffled when they do not get it. That bafflement carries an ominous undercurrent; a threat of danger runs through each tale … they have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.”

–Laurie Hertzel on Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day (The Star Tribune)

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Alexandra Jacobs on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, Becca Rothfeld on Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives, Kevin Lozano on Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, Fiona Maazel on Paul Auster’s Baumgartner, and Jess Bergman on Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Of course Barbra Streisand’s memoir, 10 years in the making if you don’t count the chapter she scribbled in longhand in the 1990s and then lost, was going to approach Power Broker proportions … For one thing, she is—fits of insecurity notwithstanding—a bona fide power broker…For another, as Streisand writes in My Name Is Barbra, a 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her, with lingering high fives for the many supporters, she does tend to agonize over the editing process … There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh. There are just so many scintillating Streisands to contemplate over so many years: singer, actress, director, producer, philanthropist, activist, lover, mother, wife, friend, autobiographer. ‘I would make a very good critic,’ she suggests at one point, and as I struggle to put a button on this, all I can reply is: Barbra, be my guest.”

–Alexandra Jacobs on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra (The New York Times)

“What if ghosts return not to haunt or hector, but because they cannot bear to relinquish the common pleasures of daily life? … Smith…writes prose at once dazzling and exacting. On nearly every page of this book is a phrase or sentence to marvel over, a word (usually an adjective) so unexpectedly apt that it freshens familiar language … So luscious that it often reads less like a collection of essays than like a work of prose poetry. Its six long sections and brief coda are not neatly contained narratives or discrete arguments, but threads in one continuous web of reminiscence and observation … Many of Smith’s flights of fancy are attempts to imagine all that the historical record conceals — to endow skeletal statistics with flesh and blood — and her lively lyricism is an antidote to the slick obfuscations of bureaucratic language. Over and over, she pits the dead rhetoric of institutions against the vibrant hum of human speech … Nothing could be less like institutional abstractions; nothing could be more lavishly particular.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives (The Washington Post)

“That discomforting riddle—what these business machinations contribute to the actual publication of actual books—is the central question of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction...Sinykin argues that the corporate ethos that dominates the modern publishing house has exerted such an overwhelming influence on the way books are written and published that it has inaugurated a new epoch: ‘the Conglomerate era.’ As he sees it, the consolidation of the industry that began in the nineteen-sixties and seventies transformed American fiction and ‘changed what it means to be an author.’ The stakes of Sinykin’s inquiry are to explain ‘how we should read’ fiction published in the U.S. during the past half century or so, a period during which every book, no matter its preoccupations or themes, could be said to reflect a greater entity: the corporation … Today’s publishing house is closer to a hedge fund than a tastemaker. Every book that it acquires is a bet on profitability. The financialization of the acquisition process functions like an index of risk, creating a ‘system in which homogeneity . . . is encouraged’ to minimize bad bets … Sinykin sidesteps the question of whether this system has made books worse. He wants to demonstrate something trickier: how the process of authoring a book has become subsumed by a larger and larger network of interests, changing what it meant to be an author. Critics and scholars, Sinykin contends, are uncomfortable displacing the author when studying literature. His book is an earnest attempt to focus attention on the non-authorial figures involved in a book’s creation. Instead of individual writers, he wants us to think in terms of a ‘feedback loop’ .. The clumsiness of these readings points to the limitations of works like Big Fiction…These are daring attempts to map the larger structures that shape how books are written and published, but their attention to the big picture can obscure how novels operate on a visceral, textual level. Still, Sinykin’s study is valuable because it speaks to the same fear that Gerald Howard voiced in 1989: that the balance of culture and commerce at the heart of publishing is increasingly weighted toward profit.”

–Kevin Lozano on Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (The New Yorker)

“I can hear the whingeing already: Nothing happens in this novel. It’s too slow, it’s boring, it’s not high concept or high event. And in a nod to how conditioned we—or at least I—have become to expect high event, I spent the first 25 pages of Baumgartner waiting for its namesake to be kidnapped, maimed or just locked in a closet by the meter man. When it was clear this just wasn’t going to be that kind of novel, I had to start over. What kind of a novel is Baumgartner, then? It’s lovely. It’s sweet. It’s odd. But maybe not so odd for Auster fans who will immediately want to locate Baumgartner in his body of work (he’s written 20 novels) and to look for leitmotifs and signature moves. There are plenty…So it’s definitely a Paul Auster novel. Albeit more tender and less playful than some of his other work … The novel walks us through what he thinks about and, more important, how he thinks. How his thoughts assemble and fall apart, how they produce a kind of cumulative power that dissipates just as powerfully in the face of life’s little intrusions … Sy is old, lonely, frail, and his life is starred with these small events in a constellation that proves explosive enough on this morning to push him out of his emotional impasse. It also pushes the novel into gear to begin exploring and excavating Sy’s memories … There are a lot of books out there about grief, and it’s hard to say what kind of conversation Baumgartner is having with them—every grief is its own. Still, Sy’s experience puts me in mind of C.S. Lewis, who at 61 lost his wife to cancer, and who wrote about the loss in A Grief Observed...As Lewis put it: ‘Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.’ Baumgartner, for its quiet and thoughtful meandering, reads the same way.”

–Fiona Maazel on Paul Auster’s Baumgartner (The New York Times Book Review)

“At the time the novel was published, Italian literary culture revolved around neorealism. The practitioners of this style…spurned elegance, artifice, and the pomposity of Fascist propaganda, using plain language to convey the devastation of the war and the fractured society it left behind. Lies and Sorcery is in many ways neorealism’s inverse. The novel, a melodramatic saga of social climbing and doomed romance, is a deliberate anachronism in both its themes and its style. Its Belle Époque setting, sweeping cast of characters, frequent asides to the reader, and grandiloquence place it firmly in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel. It is not concerned with truth but with lies: glittering surfaces, concealed identities, and foolish pretensions.​​ As Morante reminds us again and again, however, appearances are often deceiving. Despite its nineteenth-century veneer, Lies and Sorcery could have only been written in the twentieth century. The novel is animated by Morante’s hatred of the selfishness and superficiality that she saw in her countrymen. In their masochistic worship of hierarchy, tendency toward idolatry, and susceptibility to kitsch, its characters embody the traits that she believed had enabled Mussolini’s rise.”

–Jess Bergman on Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery (The New Yorker)

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Lauren Michele Jackson on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, Julie Phillips on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend, Jennifer Egan on Alice McDermott’s Absolution, Jennifer Wilson on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine, and Maggie Doherty on Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“An interesting discrepancy develops in the text. It becomes clear that Spears has limited interest in some of what we onlookers might consider the touchstones of her career … Instead, Spears’s most reflective passages, peppered with clusters of queries for a sympathetic reader, are reserved for her most wounding personal relationships, and the way that, rather than buffer the onslaught of the world, those closest to her accelerated the rate and severity of her overexposure … For some readers, the book will add to a distaste for Timberlake that has ballooned in recent years as the public reëvaluates his early career triumphs and the women, such as Spears and Janet Jackson, who served as collateral. Even at a time when skuzzy men seem poised to make a comeback, he has been unable to escape the whiff of calculated misogyny … Her writing can also veer into the sort of hammy foreshadowing one might find in a middle grade novel…But there is still value in the specifics that this memoir collects. As chilling as the previous reporting has been, Spears’s interior account of the conservatorship is a visceral view of the methodical means by which her family endeavored to eclipse her … Even if Spears wants The Woman in Me to offer lessons for her readers, the truth is that she was not an everywoman. She is an artist who has experienced a level of success that only a handful of people in the history of the world can claim. At the same time, Spears was not ‘O.K.,’ and she may never be O.K. in a prescriptive sense of the word. But proper comportment should not be a prerequisite for human dignity.”

–Lauren Michele Jackson on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me (The New Yorker)

“‘Historical novel’ isn’t quite the right term for this book, which strips that particular genre down to bare bones, omitting the elaborate descriptions of antebellum houses, clothing, and customs—except for those belonging to the practice of chattel slavery … To this portrayal of enslavement at its most brutal, Ward adds an element of the fantastic, using it—like recent writers from Colson Whitehead and Kaitlyn Greenidge to adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs—to ask questions about power, agency, and past and future choices. Ward also takes down to its essence a theme of her previous novels: the hope that love and family ties can be strong enough to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by exploitation and injustice … Ward describes every bit of the ordeal in ravishing prose that moves to the rhythm of footsteps, the pour of rain, the scrape of wind, the ache of suffering … The novelist with whom Ward seems most in conversation is Toni Morrison. Let Us Descend recalls not only Beloved, Morrison’s mother-daughter ghost story, but A Mercy, her historical novel, set in the seventeenth century, about a daughter whose enslaved mother gives her away to keep her from rapist slaveowners. Convinced that she is not loved, the daughter never recovers from what she experiences as betrayal … In response, Ward delivers a moving defense of the strength and persistence of mother love…At the close of Let Us Descend, it’s the bond between mother and child that proves the real talisman against oppression, one that affirms the human value of both their lives.

–Julie Phillips on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend (4Columns)

“Alice McDermott is rightly celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-20th-century life, with a particular focus on Irish Americans. Her fans may be startled, then, to find themselves plunged into 1963 Saigon at the start of her enveloping new novel, Absolution, whose lofty title belies its sensory, gritty humanity … The debacle of America’s involvement in Vietnam might easily have overdetermined McDermott’s story, and it is a measure of her skill that Absolution maintains an oblique relationship to the war. McDermott’s subject is not intervention per se but the altruistic impulse—particularly as practiced by those whose privilege lets them anoint themselves to heal what Charlene calls Vietnam’s ‘wretchedness.’ She’s one of many characters who are trying to ‘do good,’ and they range from the greedy and presumptuous to the genuinely selfless … The chasm between Charlene and Patricia reasserts itself, and the reader is left with a sense of how unlikely, even otherworldly, their collaboration was. Yet as American wives overseas in 1963, they had a great deal in common: a near-total lack of agency or power; a choice between parroting their husbands’ opinions or operating independently in the margins, to limited and uncertain effect. What difference might it have made, for everyone, if those wives had been given a choice in the decision-making? Without posing this question directly, Absolution leaves the reader in its provocative shadow.”

–Jennifer Egan on Alice McDermott’s Absolution (The New York Times Book Review)

“NDiaye’s latest tale, a story of class conflict embedded within a psychological thriller, is scattered with interpretive hints, clues to the crimes of contemporary French society. Though it starts with a date on the calendar, the story works like a map. The novel is dotted with coördinates around Bordeaux—neighborhood and street names—which NDiaye drops into the story like pins, marking the poor sections of the city where domestic workers live and the rich ones where they work. By the last page, I was newly fluent in the social geography of Bordeaux and its environs, well traversed in the French city’s throughways of privilege and its dead ends of precarity … In this elegantly layered tale of social stratification, NDiaye takes us through a maze of alleyways, backstreets, and elegant foyers, until we are dizzy from trying to chart the course of upward mobility and eager for a place to rest—a way out rather than in … NDiaye is interested in the elusiveness of motive in crimes committed by mothers, who, she suggests, are at the mercy of an insanity-inducing chorus of voices from all corners of society telling them what to do and how to behave … Reality is a slippery thing in NDiaye’s novels. In the tradition of French Surrealism, she aims to get at the truth by distancing herself from it. In Vengeance Is Mine, Maître Susane’s psyche breaks down as she works on Marlyne’s case, resulting in a narrative fractured by the trauma of its protagonist … NDiaye treats politics and the material conditions it creates as forces that lead to unpredictable, idiosyncratic outcomes. She never lets her characters be flattened to make a point. A lesser author might stage the interplay between Marlyne and Maître Susane as the contest between a mother and a professional, the novel becoming a stage for the drama of women’s choices to play out. NDiaye transforms them instead into versions of a single person—two women raised to court the rich, to do whatever it took to be let into their houses, even if it meant they would never be at home in their own skin.”

–Jennifer Wilson on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine (The New Yorker)

“New Ernaux is never entirely new, which makes her long career strangely difficult to interpret. Typically, a literary critic proceeds chronologically, comparing an author’s recent work to earlier work, and tracing the evolution of a writer’s style and themes over time. Ernaux thwarts this approach. As Jamie Hood and Joanna Biggs have each noted in their essays on Ernaux, her books are full of repetitions and recursions; they are not so much discrete stories as fragments of one endlessly expanding story, a kind of ‘total novel,’ as she puts it in The Years (2008). Memory, the narrative present, and the time of writing blend into one continuous timeline, stretching across different books. To read Ernaux, and to write about her, mean becoming comfortable with repetition. Her memoirs ask us to cultivate different expectations for narrative, and perhaps for life: to seek not novelty but rather the familiar, which surprises in its own way … This is one way to understand Ernaux’s repetition compulsion: By revisiting and retelling the same stories from her past, she shows that any given account is incomplete. What was missing from the first version of the story was not specific incidents or details—many of which are the same in both books—but rather Ernaux’s own feelings of guilt and despair … For Ernaux, writing is a way to demystify the past, to render it intelligible, and also a process that is never fully complete … she is less concerned with the ethics of May-December romances than she is with the way this particular romance collapses time, forcing her to repeat moments from her past—or to consider them anew … As Ernaux’s work shows, telling the story of a life always involves more than putting the facts of it in order. It means moving backward and forward through time, repeating and revisiting, uncovering old memories and fleshing out stories that have already been told. If you end up returning again and again to the same episodes, then so be it. Show them from different angles. Rearrange the order. Do whatever you must to make it new.”

–Maggie Doherty on Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man (The New Republic)

Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Leah Greenblatt on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, Hua Hsu on Staci Robinson’s Tupac Shakur, Walton Muyumba on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend, Ryan Ruby on Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and Jasmine Liu on Lydia Davis’ Our Strangers.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

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“What Spears fills in, in prose that is chatty and confiding and occasionally salty, is the ongoing thrum of family dysfunction and fear … Throughout the book, Spears repeatedly portrays her relationship to creativity as a kind of pure soul connection, a private communion with godliness independent of outside forces and opinion. Details on the actual salient process of music-making, though, are scant … The mostly linear narrative in The Woman In Me tends to treat these moments and many other well-documented highlights of her career as passing or ancillary, a distant cacophony muffled by the much louder noise of her personal struggles. Still, the facts of it are presented so cleanly and candidly that Womanseems designed to be read in one sitting. It’s nearly impossible to come out of it without empathy for and real outrage on behalf of Spears … As freely confessional and often furious as it is, The Woman in Me isn’t quite the blazing feminist manifesto that some witnesses to history may have wanted Spears to write, nor the kind of granular, completist portrait-of-an-artist autobiography that others have dutifully supplied in the past. It could be argued, though, that she never stopped telling us who she was.”

–Leah Greenblatt on Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me (The New York Times Book Review)

“In just five years of stardom, Tupac Shakur released four albums, three of which were certified platinum, and acted in six films. He was the first rapper to release two No. 1 albums in the same year, and the first to release a No. 1 album while incarcerated. But his impact on American culture in the nineteen-nineties is explained less by sales than by the fierce devotion that he inspired. He was a folk hero, born into a family of Black radicals, before becoming the type of controversy-clouded celebrity on the lips of politicians and gossip columnists alike. He was a new kind of sex symbol, bringing together tenderness and bruising might, those delicate eyelashes and the ‘fuck the world’ tattoo on his upper back. He was the reason a generation took to pairing bandannas with Versace. He is also believed to have been the first artist to go straight from prison, where he was serving time on a sexual-abuse charge, to the recording booth and to the top of the charts … That he contained such wild contradictions somehow seemed to attest to his authenticity, his greatest trait as an artist … It’s a reverential and exhaustive telling of Shakur’s story, leaning heavily on the perspective of his immediate family, featuring pages reproduced from the notebooks he kept in his teens and twenties. The biography’s publication follows Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur, a documentary series that premièred, on FX, in April. Robinson was an executive producer on Dear Mama, which drew on the same archive of estate-approved, previously unreleased materials as her book, and the works share a common purpose: to complicate Shakur without demystifying him … At the heart of the Tupac Shakur mythology is how much of his artistic persona was the result of moments in which he imagined what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes. It speaks to how empathetic—but also how impressionable—he could be. It’s something his fans often debate: Were there simply some poses he could never shake? … Perhaps Shakur’s contradictions—the gangster poet who was never exactly a gangster, the actor who could never break character—would have found resolution had he lived longer. At the heart of things was always the question of how to distinguish the persona from the person.”

–Hua Hsu on Staci Robinson’s Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography (The New Yorker)

“Leading Dante into hell, Virgil, the poet guide, intones: ‘Now let us descend into the blind world here below.’ Jesmyn Ward’s new novel…employs Alighieri as a guide through the dark, teeming forest of slavery in the United States … Among her talents, Ward can imagine and draw complex emotional and psychological lives for her adolescent characters. The children in Ward’s novels are frequently blessed with second sight and psychic understanding of animalia and supernatural worlds … Some critics have claimed that the novel form is already imbued with a kind of magic. So, any additional supernatural forces entering the literary frame seem overbearing. But Caribbean, African, South American, and ethnic American writers have yanked the form into their own matrices. There is, of course, room enough for all sorts of novelistic practices. Why be hierarchical, favoring, say, realism as the one true novelistic aesthetic, when an ecumenical approach to technique and reference offers the novelist more opportunities for dwelling in webs of contingency and linkage? For example, identifying Toni Morrison as an influence on Ward’s lyrical prose and ancestor invocation is fair, true, and too easy. Instead, we ought to read Ward as placing Greek mythology, ancient epic poets, Judeo-Christian narratives, and the system of Dante’s hell, adjacent to but not above her African American and African-descended gods. Her novels argue that these are interconnected, co-equal branches of practical magic.”

–Walton Muyumba on Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend (The Boston Globe)

“Young envisioned a book that would top out at around two hundred pages and take two years to complete. When she delivered the manuscript to Scribner eighteen years later, the stack of papers was almost half as tall as she was … In Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, the American Dream is depicted quite literally: as a series of incompatible hallucinations. Set largely in the course of a single, harrowing nighttime bus ride during the last years of Depression, the story follows the narrator, Vera Cartwheel, as she sifts through her memories of her eccentric upbringing in a mansion on the coast of New England … Vera encounters the truth as something that is constantly flipping upside down and right side up again. In Young’s telling, reality is not the neutral ground where disparate perceptions overlap; it is the interstices between them. Reality is the worm in the wheat, as the novel’s working title would have it, the point at which our ‘perfect equations’ come up short, our ‘definitions fail,’ and our desires for ‘ultimate harmony’ are frustrated. Truth is ‘but another illusion,’ Vera is forced to conclude … What Vera finds at the end of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is something none of the novel’s perfection-seekers do: love … At 1,198 pages, it is among the longest single-volume novels in the English language. If Moby-Dick, the book against which all other Great American Novels are measured, is about a single monomaniac, Miss MacIntosh is a veritable republic of Ahabs, each more idiosyncratic than the next. An Indiana bus and a New England mansion furnish the book with its principal settings, but Young, much like Melville, never fails to imbue them with cosmological import…The book is an epic of mothers and daughters, rather than of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, or war and peace, and Young’s sentences, which marry the breadth of Whitman to the opulence of Nabokov, are among the most virtuosic ever produced by an American novelist.”

–Ryan Ruby on Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (The New Yorker)

“Davis has wondered if she should continue to write amid the destruction of our environment. Her increasing ambivalence about writing is detectable in Our Strangers—not because her prose is any less good, but because its fastidiousness now seems to culminate in ordinary everyday language. In her latest stories, she has made herself smaller, shifting her focus to networks, communities, and systems, the units which we will need to think in to change course collectively. Davis’s title announces straight away the new territory she is exploring. Whereas older collections like Break it Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), and Can’t and Won’t (2013) largely feature intimate relations—husbands, ex-husbands, friends, children—this collection foregrounds a cast of strangers—neighbors, fellow travelers, old men seen around town. These strangers variously produce reactions of irritation, bafflement, pity, gratitude, and intrigue … The bond between strangers is not so different from the bond between family members, Davis suggests. Both can be seen as arbitrary. We might love our families, condemn them, or even reject them, but it’s impossible to entirely ignore them—and something like this applies to the strangers we live with, too … In a tight seven-sentence piece, Davis writes that a person’s ultimate aim should be to ‘feel small and still feel strong, and good.’ To act at all today—in relation to communities, in relation to the climate—requires an embrace of one’s own insignificance in the larger scheme of things. By giving meticulous form to her singular sensibility, Our Strangers suggests that this fact does not have to annihilate meaning. Rather, it can be a wellspring for the wonderful and absurd.”

–Jasmine Liu on Lydia Davis’ Our Strangers (The New Republic)

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor, Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine, David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, and Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“The two halves of Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s slim, searing novel are bound by both minor and major details: a brutal gang rape and murder, the punishing heat, the eerie presence of a dog in distress and two nameless characters. The first is a fastidious, quietly malevolent Israeli platoon commander who organises the gang rape and murder of a young Bedouin. The second is a woman in Ramallah who stumbles upon the story in a newspaper decades later and becomes haunted by one minor detail—the fact that the girl’s assault happened 25 years to the day before she was born … The Negev gang rape at the heart of Minor Detail is a true story, carried out by Israeli soldiers in 1949. Another minor detail: according to declassified documents, the real-life commander answered his superior’s question on whether the girl was eventually returned to her village by reporting that his soldiers killed her because ‘it was a shame to waste the petrol.’ The atmosphere is one of unbearable tension, measured by the increasing anxiety of the dog who stands as helpless sentry over the girl. He howls and cries, pants and trembles, barking endlessly. Shibli’s writing is calm and tightly controlled, lyrical in its descriptions of cruelty and uncertainty. The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smoldering, until it is shining off the page … The second section of the novel follows a Palestinian woman as she hunts down information about the crime decades later. What ought to be an ordinary search—visiting two museum archives—becomes a logistical nightmare for someone living under occupation … All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice; she writes of an elderly settler’s veined hands with tenderness, and as an author is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good.”

–Fatima Bhutto on Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (The Guardian)

“His great theme is the limits of vision, and the way that these limits, when imaginatively confronted, can serve as the basis for a kind of second sight … An elegant and unsettling prose still-life, which reflects on art’s relationship to theft and violence, to privacy and togetherness, and to the way we mark time … If Open City was a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn, Tremor occasionally sounds like a defense of the now-beleaguered genre … At least half of the novel, which hews rather closely to its protagonist’s consciousness, consists of ideas about how to live, listen, think, and see well … It’s tempting to characterize the novel as what the critic Becca Rothfeld calls ‘sanctimony literature,’ a mode of fiction designed to showcase the author’s ethical awareness. But there’s more going on than virtue signalling. Tunde’s worries over various moral problems—art restitution, the portrayal of the dead, artificial intelligence—converge on a dilemma that bedevils both him and his creator: Is there a way to represent the world and not ‘cannibalize the lives of others’? … A work of autofiction with the ambition of a systems novel, aspiring to illustrate the world’s interconnectedness without recourse to the fictional conventions of plot and psychological portraiture. Instead, it moves like an essay, interweaving slices of life with musings on Malian guitar virtuosos, astronomical phenomena, films by Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami. Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere … There is a method to the meandering. Cole uses the resonance between fragments to imply a dimly apprehended totality, like a seismologist integrating measurements from different sites to map an earthquake … Fiction takes the transparency of other minds so much for granted that it can obscure the rarity of true communion—which doesn’t always require explanation, or even the exchange of words. Tremor, with its vision of separateness and synchronicity, is obliquely about the pandemic, much in the way that Open City revolved around 9/11.”

–Julian Lucas on Teju Cole’s Tremor (The New Yorker)

“No one could legitimately call Marie NDiaye ‘overlooked’…Nonetheless, the magnificence of her writing, in all its shocks of perception, makes you feel that by rights her name should come with the same pantheonic glow that attends, say, Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante. What makes her a master? In part, it’s NDiaye’s deft interweaving of those narrative traits we associate with genre fiction, specifically crime thrillers—suspense, mystery, intrigue, a touch of the supernatural—with a high-modernist sensibility in thrall to the shifting, refractive nature of memory, unsettled selfhood, and intersubjectivity tout court. To attempt to summarize NDiaye’s approach—this blend of the heady high and supposed low—is to properly appreciate what an unruly mix it is, one that surely risks chaos, or, worse, pretension. What a feat, then, that the author invariably marshals these strains into lucid sophistication, not least in her newest book, the superbly controlled Vengeance Is Mine … The plot is accelerated by these enigmas, while the prose fruitfully resists this velocity, submerging you into time-stretched and sensation-heightened dimensions. A friend once played me a Justin Bieber song that had been slowed down by 800 percent. ‘U Smile,’ a trite little burst of sugary pop, was now transfigured into thirty-five minutes of shimmering, transcendent washes of sound that felt like an appropriate score for the cosmos. It remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. NDiaye does something like this with words. No life, no matter how modest or compromised or confused, is banal; through her telling and her talents, stray, lone consciousnesses are magnified to the epic.”

–Hermione Hoby on Marie NDiaye’s Vengeance is Mine (4Columns)

“Between Going Infinite and Walter Isaacson’s enormous biography of the increasingly daffy and grim Elon Musk, it has been a rough time for the Heroes of Capitalism genre. The future prospects for that type of book are certainly still bright; Americans aren’t going to stop revering rich people just because they are ‘awful’ or ‘boring’ any time soon. But the ways in which Going Infinite falls short suggests a problem that goes beyond a national shortage of sufficiently compelling or just acceptably non-sociopathic rich guys. The fact that Isaacson’s ‘The Genius Biographies’ series has declined from Leonardo Da Vinci to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk suggests not only that the heroes are getting less heroic, but that these books’ usual signifier of genius—vast wealth—has completely decoupled from any personal merit … Much of the satisfaction of these stories comes from how deftly Lewis explains those bigger issues and the artful, affectionate way that he colors in those characters. Lewis protagonists are not always admirable, and their motivations are not necessarily pure, but because they are correct and bold and often outside of an Establishment that is more smug or more self-interested or just slower than them, they tend to make for effective heroes. Going Infinite fails to deliver on either half of that formula. It’s not clear in the book, as it has never really been clear anywhere else, what social or economic problem is being addressed by cryptocurrency. This is doubly true of the ad hoc lawlessness of FTX … while he seldom fails to note the abstruse grandiosity that allows generalities about benefiting humanity to justify various smaller-scale inhumanities in the moment, Lewis does not doubt that Bankman-Fried wants to make many billions of dollars so that he can then give it away, at some point TBD, for some socially useful end, as effective altruism prescribes. The comedy is in the contrast—the reminder that all these strange, selfish, toweringly disagreeable people doing these socially useless things in a liminally legal space are actually doing them all to save humanity … Bankman-Fried is a weird guy and does plenty of weird things, but he is also never quite as brilliant as this story or the usual Lewis template would require. He’s absolutely high-handed and cold and difficult to be around in the ways that geniuses are, but any sense of his genius seems to have been reverse-engineered from how unstintingly, exhaustingly reckless and unpleasant and uncaring he is. As with Musk, the fact that Bankman-Fried was a billionaire when Lewis started reporting the book seems to not just color but retroactively justify what a turd he otherwise is; why else would this distinguished author be writing a book about him?”

–David Roth on Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (New York Magazine)

“…a ghost story conjured by representatives of a deceased author’s estate. It all sounds a little uncanny. Isn’t that the case, though, whenever we try to resurrect dead writers? In the past decade, a resurgence of acclaim has fully established Shirley Jackson as the queen of dark literary fiction, and there is no surer sign of an author’s success than the arrival of a new generation of writers eager to channel her spirit, rereading and reimagining her work. So much for the death of the author … These days, the more sophisticated literary estates may be less likely to hire ghostwriters to imitate a deceased writer’s work; instead, they authorize established writers to continue the work (and share cover credit) under their own names. The premise of a seamless transition, in which the original author slips off into the afterlife unnoticed, has been replaced by a Frankenstein-like chimera of the living and the dead…Such collaborations tend to be respectful, reasonably successful, and positively reviewed, but there often is, nonetheless, something unnervingly lifeless about them. Like all the undead, the books’ resurrected protagonists are free to perform only a few limited actions, shadowy repetitions of actions they took in life—solving mysteries, spying on behalf of England, channelling the One Power. It’s hard to read them without imagining those unseen authorities peering over the writer’s shoulder and wondering about the limits of their good will … the creation of official sequels and spinoffs is inevitably haunted by questions of agency, power, and control. To join Elizabeth Hand on her journey to Hill House is to be reminded of the slippery dominance of genius, the way it both establishes and breaks its own rules, tempting then trapping those who dare to follow them. Faithfully adhering to the rules doesn’t guarantee success, yet breaking them will inevitably invite accusations of failure and betrayal. Each reader who arrives at A Haunting on the Hill hoping to return to the original Hill House will feel disappointed in her own way, although the shape of her disappointment will speak more to the nature of her loyalty to Jackson than to the qualities of the new book. Perhaps unsurprisingly, A Haunting on the Hill is least successful when Hand directly imitates Jackson, most successful when she draws on her own talents—and becomes truly fascinating when Hand lets those anxious whispers about authority and influence take over the tale.”

–Kristen Roupenian on Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (The New Yorker)

Our fivesome of fabulous reviews this week includes Michelle Orange on Mary Gabriel’s Madonna, Becca Rothfeld on Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Hugh Ryan on Justin Torres’ Blackouts, Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful, and Jennifer Szalai on Fergus M. Bordewich’s Klan War.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“Suggests something comprehensive: it is eight hundred and eighty pages … Light on author interviews and other new source material, the biography is a towering work of assemblage, a guided tour through the origins and the creative life of ‘the enigma called Madonna,’ with a view to solidifying her status as a leading artist of her time. That there exists some doubt about this forms a subtext of the book, which, like any biography, proposes a fragile patchwork of contracts with the reader in the name of mastering its subject and fulfilling its brief … Gabriel, a former Reuters editor, organizes the chapters by dateline, taking an almanac-like approach, the idea being, more or less, that a thorough record of Madonna’s accomplishments will speak for itself. The result succeeds on the strength of that record and on the fine-toothed diligence with which Gabriel, who has claimed that she set out with no particular knowledge of or attachment to Madonna, combs through it. The tone is one of admiring dispassion, the approach at times discreet to the point of inertia. Readers hungry for original takes, fresh intel, or freewheeling analysis will remain so. Gabriel avoids risk and complication as fervently as Madonna has sought them out, spinning modest threads of historical, political, and cultural context that are never less than perfectly apt and rarely anything more … Though Gabriel emphasizes the relationships that have helped midwife Madonna’s work, she fails to make them intelligible: we get no sense of the artist’s grind, her habits and challenges as a songwriter, singer, producer, dancer, or director; or of how her vision and her ear have prevailed, in a decades-long evolution, through countless co-productions and genre dalliances. Old press-tour quotes on this subject are as illuminating as you might expect … More than her talent or her cunning, Madonna’s success reflects a public’s ambivalence about those freedoms we cherish, even as they frighten, bewilder, and enthrall us. Her story is that of an artist committed to remaking certain old ideals: beauty, sovereignty, connection, grit. It also tells of how starved we were, and still are, for their pure embodiment.”

–Michelle Orange on Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life (The New Yorker)

“The book is nonlinear and exuberantly free-associative, less a narrative than an extravagant demonstration of sensibility … The book’s oddities will delight devotees of Herzog’s singular cinema, but readers unfamiliar with his tragicomic tirades and brooding philosophical meditations may find his digressions vexing … He recounts near-fatal exploit after near-fatal exploit with unwavering sang-froid, as if it is perfectly natural, even inevitable, to pursue the impossible to the brink of death … I got the impression that Herzog has not only never had a normal experience but that he has never encountered a normal person … Is any of this true? These marvelously magical remembrances may not be flatly accurate, but childhood is, most essentially, a land of terrors and enchantments, and a sober account of its charms would only serve to distort them. No one understands better than Herzog that, as he puts it, ‘truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts,’ that it is a matter of ‘poetic imagination.’ ‘The ecstatic truth’ is his wonderful name for the elusive quality he chases in his documentaries, which are not dry investigations but feats of storytelling with a distinctive point of view. In many ways, this is a shockingly impersonal memoir, but there is one sense in which Herzog is palpable in it. His melancholic, meditative and theatrically nostalgic way of being is as irrepressible in his writing as it is in his films. Sometimes, he verges on self-parody…But if Herzog is a fertile subject for satire, it is only because he is so inimitably and emphatically himself … I feel the same sense of awe when I contemplate the phenomenon of Werner Herzog as I do when I contemplate the pyramids. Amazing, that this fabulous impracticality exists. Amazing, that we go to such lengths to achieve such magnificent superfluities. Amazing, that we create such burdens for ourselves, and for no other reason than that, if we didn’t, we would be living dully, without the respite of our dreams.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All (The Washington Post)

“…erasure poetry is much like queer history, a discipline that revolves around reading against the archive—mining biased sources for neutral facts, reading meaning into what isn’t said as much as what is, and flensing useful details off a rotten mass of lies. In Torres’s lyrical new novel, Blackouts, these two forms—erasure poetry and queer history—collide to create one epic conversation between a pivotal 20th-century queer sexology text and two unreliable queer Puerto Rican narrators … The further into the novel you go, the less ‘real’ everything outside Juan’s and nene’s stories seems. It is impossible to tell if ‘the Palace’ is a sad charity hospice for dying homosexuals, for instance, or some kind of queer bardo for gay ghosts. The supreme pleasure of the book is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality—a perfect metaphor for the delirious disorientation that comes with learning queer history as an adult … Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on, creating the next link in a queer chain from Jan to Juan to nene to you.”

–Hugh Ryan on Justin Torres’ Blackouts (The New York Times Book Review)

“Now 76, the five-time Terminator becomes a first-time Tony Robbins with the publication of his self-help book … Yes, like a moribund franchise, the Austrian Oak has been rebooted—this time as an elder statesman ready to dispense hard-won wisdom as abundantly as he once doled out movie death … His sensible guru era suggests that Schwarzenegger believes it’s temperance rather than bile that behooves an elder statesman and that the nation will eventually return to its senses. It also puts clear space between him and the parlous ghouls of today’s GOP, with its commando tactics and true lies. But what of the book? Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility. You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status…it’s thoroughly expendable—an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal … That the book is a naked attempt by a twilight superstar to shore up his legacy and project a new and benign vision of himself is abundantly obvious. Be not fooled: When Schwarzenegger talks of having vision, the ‘tunnel’ is silent.”

–Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life (The Los Angeles Times)

“A vivid and sobering account of Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan in the South … For the most part, Bordewich’s narrative hews closely to the historical period, showing how federal power was the only way to stamp out local regimes that countenanced the suffering of Black people while allowing white perpetrators to go unpunished. For all their cries about ‘states’ rights,’ the Klan was unabashedly antidemocratic. Some Black Southerners, especially those who survived attacks or witnessed the violence firsthand, decided that they couldn’t bear the extreme risk of simply exercising their franchise. Bordewich includes some heart-rending testimony from freedmen who were too terrified to go to the ballot box. As one Black man put it, ‘I had to deny voting to save myself’ … Toward the end of the book, Bordewich gestures toward the fractured political landscape of the present day. Grant’s victory over the Klan is a story that many Americans would like to tell themselves, but the retrenchment that followed is a cautionary tale. A premature push for conciliation and compromise can leave the roots of some very old pathologies untouched, ready to grow again when the conditions are right. ‘Barbarism,’ Bordewich writes, ‘may lie only a small distance beneath the skin of civilization.’”

–Jennifer Szalai on Fergus M. Bordewich’s Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and Battle to Save Reconstruction (The New York Times)

Our quintet of quality reviews this week features Claire Vaye Watkins on Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, Becca Rothfeld on Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC, Mark Dery on Daniel Clowes’ Monica, Quiara Alegría Hudes on Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, and Lauren LeBlanc on Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s book review aggregator.

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“In her 2021 novel Harrow, the 21st-century monk Joy Williams wrote: ‘I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.’ Melissa Broder’s incandescent new novel, Death Valley, is, like her desert forebears, ecstatically awake to the world’s astonishments … Immediately the Mojave starts working its miracles on this sad, horny woman who feels afraid of the sky, judged by the moon and cosmically needy’ … In prose of unparalleled style and seemingly effortless bravery, Broder’s narrator shoots an entire quiver of emotional arrows into herself and then, like Frida Kahlo’s little deer, bounds into the wilderness, heart open, wounds weeping, no hat, not enough water. Despite fearing herself and her novel ‘too earthbound,’ she digs in, getting as earthy as Mary Austin or Ana Mendieta by climbing into a magical Saguaro cactus. Here Broder’s riotously original ecosexual surrealism performs an uncanny transubstantiation, the novel becoming a survival adventure that couldn’t have been better written by Jack London himself. Broder’s euphoric plotting and winning characters combine with a gift for desert description (that pink light creeping out into infinity) reminiscent of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. I tried to ration this book but guzzled … If we can learn, as Broder all but implores, to worship a land that would impale the sentimental, leaf-stroking impulse of the pastoral, then maybe we can love the whole world as it deserves to be loved. Given that the protagonist meets God in the Mojave, what to make of the fact that many of the places that awaken us to the world’s astonishments are slated for sacrifice? … Death Valley is a triumph, a ribald prayer for sensuality and grace in the face of profound loss, a hilarious revolt against the aggressive godlessness, dehumanization and fear plaguing our time.”

–Claire Vaye Watkins on Melissa Broder’s Death Valley (The New York Times Book Review)

“…the geniuses who fascinate the Chilean author Benjamín Labatut dream of abdicating their personhood to become gods and machines … Is The MANIAC a work of fiction? Or do we call it fiction because we lack a better word for its creative conquest of fact? Most critics tasked with rendering Labatut recognizable liken him to the melancholic German writer W.G. Sebald, whose gently meandering novels contain long, dreamy meditations on destruction and decay. It is true that both authors toe the wavering line between invention and history, drawing on a wealth of historical and scientific details, but Labatut is that vanishingly uncommon thing: a contemporary writer of thrilling originality…The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty. It can also be difficult to read. The book is narrated by a cluttered polyphony of characters, among them both of von Neumann’s wives and a number of his teachers and colleagues. But there is a reason for this mad mumble of voices … Like von Neumann, The MANIAC strives to adopt the impartial standpoint of the universe … Labatut’s characters are all agonizingly human in one respect, no matter how hard they are trying to become machines: They care immensely. They are desperate to get to the bottom of things, all the way to the entrails of reality … It is dangerous for a mortal to approach the mind of God, and it is no surprise that everyone in Labatut’s fiction is always going mad, even the figures mentioned only in passing … The worst part of these dark tales, though, is not that reason revolts when it is pressed too far but that the world turns out to be disordered, down to its very seams…Tumult is not an affront to human reason but its logical culmination. The only way to transcend confusion is to transcend human cognition itself.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC (The Washington Post)

“In Monica, his trademark cynicism about the Lynchian depravity behind the salesman’s smarm and self-help platitudes of American life has shifted into a more pensive, philosophical key. Clowes is resolutely the atheist he always was, but Monica reveals his Gen-X cynicism as the zeitgeist-y side of a deeper disquiet … In Monica’s cover story, a mystery about a woman desperate to unriddle the miseries of her childhood, Clowes confronts—with his usual black-comedic wit—questions usually reserved for religion. He wrestles with the complications of life after death (what do you do when grandad reveals himself, from beyond the grave, as an anti-Semite?); unearths the historical roots of Gen-X angst and anomie, which for Clowes are the psychic scum left by the receding wave of the counterculture; ponders the perils (and seductions) of blind faith; and takes the full, painful measure of the persistence of memory that makes us prisoners of our pasts … Of course, Clowes being Clowes, we’re nagged by the suspicion that we’re meant to read the story at an ironic remove, as creepy yet campy—a suspicion reinforced by his visual rhetoric. Densely referential, polyvalent, and—a word that’s now officially cringeworthy, but was all the rage in Eightball’s heyday—postmodern in its knowing use of genre tropes and signature styles, Clowes’s work is always in dialogue with the comics medium. In Monica, he walks the line between homage and parody, appropriating—and interrogating—the comic books and Sunday funnies he grew up with.”

–Mark Dery on Daniel Clowes’ Monica (4Columns)

“Sinclair’s breathless, scorching memoir of a girlhood spent becoming the perfect Rasta daughter and an adolescence spent becoming one of Jamaica’s most promising young poets. For its sheer lusciousness of prose, the book’s a banquet. Sinclair’s Montego Bay drips with tender sensuality and complexity that seduces you like a fresh wound to slow pokes and feels … A gripping tale of fundamentalism and the light of rebellion piercing through its cracks. Critiques of colonial and patriarchal violence weave throughout, made all the more scathing by Sinclair’s patient understatement. At the book’s core, though, is a personal tale of two artists separated by a chasm … While the memoir’s conclusion explodes with urgency, it lacks Sinclair’s slow-brewed sagacity. History catches up with her, and not enough years have passed for wisdom to surface. I was startled by the finale — was all her searing testimony in service of Djani’s redemption? I had to put the book down, walk away. With a bit of distance, I came to feel that the center of this book was its matriarch. Despite her obedient silences, her rare and shocking betrayals of Sinclair’s safety, Esther quietly instigates tectonic shifts in her children’s lives. Her motherly accomplishments are impressive, but it’s her decisive redirection of her own path that illuminates the long arc of self-liberation.”

–Quiara Alegría Hudes on Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon (The New York Ties Book Review)

“Explores familiar territory from a new point of view in a style new to him. It unfolds through passages ranging in length from less than a page to a dozen, each labeled and dated. And it leaps between decades and then into liminal spaces that exist across time to cast a light on forgotten exchanges and actions. This kaleidoscopic, fragmentary quality is no lark; it is essential to Lethem’s project … At first glance, the book’s stark title — coupled with Lethem’s frequent play with mystery tropes—signals that this is a genre novel. It is definitely not … A brutal question to ask yourself: Was writing a book about your childhood friends and home turf an act of betrayal? … Lethem lets the ragged edges remain visible. The story’s texture and pacing echoes his message … The novel is also an endless declaration of love. Every neighborhood deserves such a discursive portrait, such ruthless devotion and such an audacious book.”

–Lauren LeBlanc on Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel (The Los Angeles Times)

Our quintet of quality reviews this week features Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, Fiona Mosley on Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, Julian Lucas on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, William Davies on Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, and Parul Sehgal on James Ellroy’s The Enchanters.

“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer. Throughout the tome, Musk’s confidantes, co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends present a DSM-5’s worth of psychiatric and other theories for the ‘demon moods’ that darken the lives of his subordinates, and increasingly the rest of us, among them bipolar disorder, OCD, and the form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s. But the idea that any of these conditions are what makes Musk an ‘asshole’ (another frequently used descriptor of him in the book), while also making him successful in his many pursuits, is an insult to all those affected by them who manage to change the world without leaving a trail of wounded people, failing social networks and general despair behind them. The answer then must lie elsewhere. There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter … To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best … There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your savior turns out to be the world’s loudest crank? … there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room … When you are as messed up as our hero, there is a lot of psychological work to be done to stop the downward spiral, work more boring than building a rocket. Work even more boring than this book.”

–Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (The Guardian)

“Groff’s characters are always in search of a better life; she is a writer animated by problems of community and utopian thinking. But in this unnamed 17th-century colony, fear and hunger have bred only violence … Groff’s novels often account for a character’s entire life, propelling the reader through a cascade of keenly articulated, outward-facing presents, rather than cogitations on the past. The Vaster Wilds is much narrower in time frame, taking place over just a few weeks, and more urgent in its objectives. Pursued by threats real and imagined, the girl is driven by a sovereign hunger, and Groff is lyrically, painstakingly attentive to the textures of her craving … A rather lonely novel, yet one shot through with Groff’s perennial interest in the pioneering spirit … A testament to individual struggle. The girl leaves her home behind, but also, like the hermit, her language. As such, the other humans she encounters are largely ephemeral. She is a stranger to them; they are strangers to her. While I found myself occasionally wishing for the humor and vitality of Groff’s previous, heavily populated novels, there is no doubt she has the skill to carry this one-woman show … The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose. Sentence after sentence, Groff creates luminous, sparely rendered images, the historical setting allowing her to play with cadence and grammar … Some of the best fiction is capacious rather than penetrative, rounded rather than aculeate, holding the abundance of a vessel rather than the violence of, say, a spear. This is the radical vision of The Vaster Wilds.”

–Fiona Mosley on Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds (The New York Times Book Review)

“The Most Secret Memory of Men is an aerobatic feat of narrative invention, whirling between noir, fairy tale, satire, and archival fiction in its self-reflexive meditation on the nature of literary legend. Its Goncourt was seen as a coup in the world of French letters, which had never before conferred its highest recognition on a writer from sub-Saharan Africa … There’s an element of poetic justice in an homage to [Yambo] Ouologuem winning such approbation from the very establishment that discarded him. Sarr witheringly scrutinizes the cultural Françafrique—a word for France’s geopolitical influence over its former colonies—that relegates African fiction to the status of veiled memoir, ethnographic study, or folkloric entertainment. Defying these categories, he delivers a demiurgic story of literary self-creation, transforming the sad fate of an author who stopped writing into a galvanizing tale about all that remains to be written … Fictionalizing literary history can allow writers to exorcise its overbearing presence, to escape its clichés and culs-de-sac. Jorge Luis Borges reviewed imaginary books to overcome the enormous weight of the forebears who obsessed him. Ishmael Reed, in his novel Mumbo Jumbo, tried to free African American writers from their pigeonholes by parodying the archetypal figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Similarly, Sarr borrows from Ouologuem’s life to fashion a new origin myth for his tradition … The Most Secret Memory of Men arrives amid a rupture between France and its former colonies in Africa. A spate of coups across West and Central Africa—in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and, most recently, Gabon—have been applauded by crowds expressing their opposition to France’s military and economic influence over the region…Sarr weaves these anxieties into Diégane’s return to Senegal, where he comes to search for Elimane…But in the novel he dutifully cobbles together a vague political crisis far less compelling than the ones in his previous work. It reads like a halfhearted apology for writing a novel about literature rather than current events … literature needs its legends. African literature, perpetually at risk of reduction to testimony, might need them more than most. Sometimes the greatest tribute that authors can pay to their predecessors is simply to continue where they left off.”

–Julian Lucas on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men (The New Yorker)

“You may well wonder how such a faintly comical theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict the left, in particular the loss of its monopoly (if it ever had one) over the language of political resistance, and how, in the process, that language has lost its grip on the world … This is a book that offers scant optimism for the future, but if there is hope lingering here, it’s that collective self-reflection—through historical knowledge and organizing—offers political resources that solitary self-reflection never will. True to form, Klein’s ultimate message is log off and get on to the streets.”

–William Davies on Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (The Guardian)

“To pick up a James Ellroy novel in the year 2023 is to know the score. We…do not arrive expecting much in the way of lavish scene-setting, characters who confound us with complexity, or commas. We are here for the short, stabby sentences and percussive rhythms. Stories are sheared down to bare-bones plot, almost stage directions, almost, at times, demented square-dance calls … Beyond the syntax, beyond the quick, greasy fun, there’s a world view shaped by personal tragedy … What does it mean to embrace such men? For Ellroy, this is literary vision—to see the world for what it is, to love it as it is without flinching, and to see yourself in the same way. In effect, it means that he can never fully abandon his psychosexual plots; they burn at the core of everything he writes … Repetitiveness, this obstinacy, is a distinctive feature of Ellroy’s writing. His fiction, at its most potent, is driven less by plot than by ritual. He has been canonized and censured; he writes now, in his mid-seventies, on a plane beyond the exigencies of either, enjoying a rare kind of freedom … Marilyn remains fragmented and removed, strips of celluloid; it’s only Freddy whose body heat we feel … The Enchanters, which takes place during L.A.’s August heat, is at once panting and sluggish … What it feels we are left with—the ribs and spine of a book, delivered with strange weariness … But, for all the novel’s exasperations, its author’s talent for mayhem still has its charms.”

–Parul Sehgal on James Ellroy’s The Enchanters (The New Yorker)

Our five-alarm fire of fantastic reviews this week features Andrea Long Chu on Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, Jonathan Dee on Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum, Laura Marsh on Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, Dwight Garner on Tracy Daugherty’s Larry McMurtry: A Life, and James Wood on Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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“Zadie Smith’s first book, White Teeth, was the English comic novel on bath salts…All the while, one never lost sight of Smith herself, bursting with exuberance and sincerity … A novelist has a sacred right to hate her first novel, but White Teeth remains by far the best thing Smith has ever written; what bad luck to have done it by 24! Smith has apparently concluded that White Teeth’s greatest strength, its audacious unreality, was in fact its fatal flaw. Today, she is firmly within the realist camp despite her recurring feints at departure. Her much-debated 2008 essay ‘Two Paths for the Novel,’ which pitted the ‘lyrical realism’ of Balzac and Flaubert against the 20th-century avant-garde, reads now like two paths for Zadie Smith. Every time she has set out down the second path, it has looped consolingly back into the first … Her two paths for the novel have become a perfect circle: What could be more avant-garde in an age of data harvesting and identity politics than a heartfelt 19th-century novel? The socially minded Eliot believed that through sympathetic portraits of ordinary people, the novel could provide readers with ‘the raw material of moral sentiment.’ With The Fraud, Smith delivers her most passionate defense of this idea to date. Whether it persuades is another matter … For Smith, the novel is just such an experiment in thinking beyond our closely held identities. It’s true that many bad novels have substituted ideology for interest. It’s equally true that Smith envisions the novel as a little liberal machine for making more little liberals. ‘We hope all of humanity will reject the project of dehumanization,’ she wrote in an essay on Toni Morrison last year. ‘We hope for a literature—and a society!—that recognizes the somebody in everybody.’ Fine words! But they are all gums, and no white teeth … The irony of Smith’s career is that she has never actually excelled at constructing the kind of sympathetic, all-too-human characters she advocates for … Their studied ordinariness makes us long for Smith’s true strength, which lies not in character but in voice. We read her because she possesses that rare and precious gift of sounding always like herself … For any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.”

–Andrea Long Chu on Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Vulture)

“Feels like a valediction to a career that, until now, has been varied in its instruments but consistent in its vision. The Suicide Museum can legitimately be described as autofiction; Dorfman himself is the narrator and central character, and a vast array of other people appear under their real names, including his wife and children and parents and a host of Chilean political figures, along with Jackson Browne and Christopher Reeve and Gabriel García Márquez. The book is set largely in the nineteen-nineties, and its focus is on the day in 1973 when La Moneda, Allende’s Presidential palace, was stormed. (Dorfman himself—by providential circumstances that also provoked a lifelong guilt—should have been present then but was not.) It is, however, also a novel that looks toward the future, and wrestles anew with Allende’s legacy and its relevance in a world whose sense of crisis, fifty years later, has been reframed … The billionaire, as a character, is having a moment in contemporary fiction. The ascendant trope seems to be that there is nothing of which a billionaire is not capable, which makes such figures sinister but also exquisitely useful in plot terms. Their combination of endless resources and psychological deformity means that you can use them to make anything happen. Even in the most naturalistic settings, they wander freely beyond the borders of realism … In a novel filled with real-life figures and events, Hortha gradually begins to read as a tragicomic avatar of Dorfman’s own late-in-life struggle to reconcile ideas that don’t fit together comfortably but that he cannot abandon: a ghost let loose in a memoir … He insists that the myth of Allende retains its utility, even in a world the man himself wouldn’t recognize.”

–Jonathan Dee on Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum (The New Yorker)

“This story of mistaken identity would on its own be gripping and revealing enough, both as a psychological study and for its explorations of the double in art and history, the disorienting effects of social media, and the queasy feeling of looking into a distorted mirror. But the larger subject of Doppelganger turns out to be a far more complex and consequential confusion: Its guiding question is how so many people have in recent years broken with conventional left-right political affiliations and a shared understanding of reality, and crossed over into the ‘Mirror World,’ a realm of ‘uncanny people’ and ‘upside-down politics’ where facts are arbitrary and people who still advertise themselves as liberals can make common cause with conspiracists and fascists. The Naomi-Naomi story is more than a generous and capacious reflection on being taken for someone else; it is also the frame for a uniquely astute account of the scrambled political formations that have come out of the pandemic … One of the strengths of Klein’s book is the clarity with which she traces the composition of the ‘strange-bedfellow coalitions’ that have coalesced since the pandemic, encompassing the traditional right and the conspiratorial hard right … Doppelganger could have followed the contours of so many stories of doubles and stolen identities and evil twins, in which the goal is chiefly to unmask the impostor; with the doppelgänger vanquished, order is restored, and all is well again. Klein is clear that this story is not that simple: Even if we could banish misinformation, we would still be left with a series of social, political, and environmental crises that have gone largely unaddressed in government—hardly a vision of equilibrium. A major reason why the distortions and evasions of the Mirror World have appealed to so many people is that the baseline of political health in the United States today is so very low.”

–Laura Marsh on Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (The New Republic)

“McMurtry…was a demythologizer of the American West who appeared to live in several registers at once. On the one hand, this biography suggests that his life was rather deluxe. He was the American president of PEN, the literature and human rights group. He ate caviar at Petrossian with Susan Sontag…On the other hand, he’d grown up on a ranch. The ochre mud never entirely came off his boots, nor did he want it to. He wasn’t entirely comfortable on the coasts. He was a sloppy dresser; his belts tended to miss some loops. He loved Fritos, Dr Pepper, peanut patties and Hershey’s chocolate bars. He had a method with the Hershey’s bars. He liked them warm. He’d let them melt on his car’s dashboard while driving, then lick the goo off the wrapper … The antic side of his personality means that Daugherty’s book, Larry McMurtry: A Life, reads a bit like one of McMurtry’s novels. Elegy and humor bleed into each other … [Daugherty] is the right person for this job, perhaps too much so. If his book has a fault, it’s that Daugherty tries to out-McMurtry McMurtry. His sentences get awfully loose and folksy…and this quality tempted me to sink in my own seat the way McMurtry did in that movie theater. I decided not to let it bother me, and you shouldn’t either, because he does everything else well … McMurtry was recognized, during his lifetime, as an important American writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize (for Lonesome Dove) and an Academy Award (for writing the Brokeback Mountain screenplay with his frequent collaborator Diana Ossana). He matters because of how closely he observed declining ways of life, and he intimately charted the national migration from rural to urban existence. But as he pointed out, in a letter to his friend Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his books worked because of the attention paid to character: ‘For me the novel is character creation. Style is nice, plot is nice, structure is OK, social significance is OK, symbolism worms its way in, timeliness is OK too, but unless the characters convince and live the book’s got no chance.’”

–Dwight Garner on Tracy Daugherty’s Larry McMurtry: A Life (The New York Times)

“George Eliot sometimes bores me, especially the George Eliot draped in greatness. Think of the extremities of nineteenth-century fiction: labile Lermontov; crazy, visionary Melville; nasty, world-hating Flaubert; mystic moor-bound Brontës; fanatical, trembling Dostoyevsky; explosive Hamsun. There’s enough wildness to destroy the myth of that stable Victorian portal ‘classic realism.’ It was not classic—certainly not then—and not always particularly ‘real.’ Instead, it was a storm of madness, extravagant allegory, tyrannical ambition, violent religiosity, violent atheism. Amid this tableau, at the calm median of the century’s religious belief and its unbelief, is wise, generous George Eliot: the saintly oracle consulted and visited by young Henry James and many other important admirers … It was this George Eliot whom Virginia Woolf had in mind when she wrote, in 1919, that the long-faced, oracular Victorian had become, for Woolf’s generation, ‘one of the butts for youth to laugh at’ … Even now, in a world of quite different pieties, it can be difficult to disinter George Eliot from our reverence, to rediscover the writer who had enough radical daring and agnostic courage to take on the whole sniffing righteousness of Victorian England. Clare Carlisle’s eloquent and original book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, allows us to do that, by placing at the center of her inquiry the abiding preoccupation and scandal of George Eliot’s life and work: marriage … Carlisle vividly animates this dangerous writer, and sets before us, in her early chapters, the young woman of letters before she became ‘George Eliot’ … Carlisle, a philosopher who has written studies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, combines a biographer’s eye for stories with a philosopher’s nose for questions. Her masterly and enriching study is based, I think, on two related premises: that marriage is a private story, about whose intimacies we can only speculate (novels, of course, and George Eliot’s novels preëminently, dramatize those intimacies for us); and that marriage is also a public story, a constantly adjusted fable, the propaganda that a household needs in order to run its little polity.”

–James Wood on Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life (The New Yorker)

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Alexandra Harris on Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, Clare Sestanovich on Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, Alison Kelly on Joyce Carol Oates’ Zero-Sum, Lily Meyer on Colin Winnette’s Users, and Katy Waldman on Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

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“Partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it’s a comedy: those two things at once. Few would dare; fewer could pull it off as Smith does here, mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire as she sketches scenes of life in 19th-century England and the Caribbean … A complicated mosaic of episodes from interleaved plots … In all her novels, Smith refuses single trajectories and central heroes. Here, in glimpses and panoramas, she finds the meshing fibres of the world that link Bogle with the eminent Victorian novelist writing romances, with the Stepney woman cheering an impostor in a courtroom, and with Eliza … A curious combination of gloriously light, deft writing and strenuous construction. There’s a risk of readerly bafflement as bright shards of narrative are shaken into unpredictable combinations across time and place. But the novel’s hybridity becomes part of its fascination. It slows and expands lavishly in honor of its Victorian subjects, yet its chapters are elliptical half-scenes chosen with modernist economy.”

–Alexandra Harris on Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (The Guardian)

“A capacious container for our space-related concerns … Part of the pleasure of reading Terrace Story is figuring out how its peculiar architecture works … There’s both something old-fashioned about these flicks of the magic-realist wand—a touch of Kafka, a dusting of García Márquez, even a spoonful of Mary Poppins—and something distinctly of our moment … Leichter is interested in the bewitched space of narrative itself. The fable, with tidy generic conventions but stretchy moral lessons, performs a kind of magic on the novel, giving a slim work legend-like scope … Readers of Leichter’s first novel, Temporary (2020), will not be surprised to find themselves in enchanted apartments, or even in the multiverse. Her début, a fantastical sendup of the gig economy, features pirates and career criminals, a witch and a ghost, several precocious and parentless children, and a lot of puns. By comparison, Terrace Story has a subtler, sadder touch; marriage and family life take center stage. This may sound disappointing, as if your once wild friend had settled down, had a kid, and started serving hors d’œuvres. But convention turns out to be a perilously slippery slope, where the friction between fantasy and reality generates heat … Leichter doesn’t moralize about her craft, but her book ventures a compelling case for it. For all of us who lack superpowers, storytelling may be the surest way to grasp the elastic dimensions of life.”

–Clare Sestanovich on Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story (The New Yorker)

“‘In game theory, a zero-sum game is one in which there is a winner and there is a loser and the spoils go to the winner and nothing to the loser,’ observes the narrator of the title story of Joyce Carol Oates’s brilliant new collection. Ideal love would be the opposite of this, a non-zero-sum game involving the exchange of equal affection to the benefit of both, or all. In practice, these stories suggest, this is seldom true: human beings are predisposed for competition, exploitation and destruction, for profiting at others’ expense. Whether in love, professional life, family contexts or our relationships with other species and the environment, all our activities are zero-sum games … A self-described formalist, inveterately inventive and experimental, Oates presses the zero-sum principle to extremes in a volume bringing together philosophical narratives, psychological studies, science fiction, dystopia, horror, dark comedy and suspenseful mystery. No single genre satisfies her creative energies and restless imagination, with the result that reading these tales is a startling and disturbing adventure. Having finished one variation on the theme, the reader never knows what form the next will take … There are several stories concerning motherhood, each approached from a sharply different angle, from suicidal anguish in the aftermath of miscarriage…to postnatal depression and maternal anxiety…to the attempted disposal of an unwanted four-year-old in a yard sale…No subject matter or narrative stance appears to be off limits … Humanity, Joyce Carol Oates suggests, could one day all too plausibly face the ultimate zero-sum game.”

–Alison Kelly on Joyce Carol Oates’ Zero-Sum (Times Literary Supplement)

“Users seems, initially, like a run-of-the-mill tech satire. It is set in an unnamed wealthy suburb populated by tech workers that it is difficult not to see as Silicon Valley, and Winnette writes in the cool, wry tone that often signals clear mockery. Miles’s work trajectory, which takes him from creating concepts for online games to masterminding a brand-new virtual-reality pod called the Egg, is well suited to satire: The Egg is precisely the sort of flashy futuristic object that venture capitalists might invest in. But Users isn’t making fun of Miles for inventing it—or making fun of him at all. On its surface, the book seems dry and measured, but at its core, it is a shaky, doubtful, unsettling little book. Users asks its readers to wonder what lurks in the depths of any given person’s mind—or, more alarming, what technology and the Internet may have inserted there—and whether those depths are, perhaps, shallower than they used to be … Users is not only anxious about the Internet’s capacity to change our desires. It also worries over the question—which Winnette leaves intentionally dangling—of whether a horrible fantasy was in fact lurking in Miles’s mind all along … It is not a satisfying ending—nor should it be. Among the novel’s strengths is Winnette’s ability to capture the dissatisfaction that life online generates. While other novelists have focused on the addictive, sickening effects of endless scrolling, Winnette highlights the opposite: the slow numbing of the imagination that comes from hooking it up to machines.”

–Lily Meyer on Colin Winnette’s Users (The Nation)

“The novel is about things coming back different, coming back weird. Its more than six hundred pages explore the eeriness of transformative change, and they are packed with literal and symbolic deaths. The first lines dispatch a handful of incidental characters … Murray handles his protagonists with comparable ruthlessness, introducing them only to rip their identities and projected futures out from under them…Some of their metamorphoses are comic…and some are tragic…but what binds them together is a neck-prickling sense of defamiliarization. As with his celebrated second novel, Skippy Dies, Murray intertwines registers from the lyre-strumming to the fart-ripping … Although Murray’s swivelling P.O.V. framework evokes family novels by Jonathan Franzen and Maile Meloy, the best comparison may be to William Faulkner, whose experimental language helped differentiate between the voices of the Compson siblings in The Sound and the Fury, and who also had a heightened sense of the eeriness of transformative change. Murray shows off his formidable range, immersing us in worlds so distinct and textured that they seem to blot one another out—subjectivity and how its wonderful thickness can lead people astray being one of this author’s preoccupations. Early chapters are propelled by a sustained sense of revelation. As the details pile up, irony, both caustic and elegiac, flourishes in the knowledge gaps between characters.”

–Katy Waldman on Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (The New Yorker)